Dreamwives

Katrina Webb is a middle-aged housewife whose husband has left her, and she is suddenly broke. Then she runs into an old friend, Michelle Redlin-Wu, who cares for her elderly father and has just lost her job. Over a stolen bottle of champagne, the two women decide that the domestic and emotional work women have mostly carried for centuries should be paid for. That decision becomes their business.

Their employees, the Dreamwives, are not cleaners, nannies or housekeepers. They make a home feel warm and welcoming by cooking dinner, leaving the bathroom spotless but just slightly used, and listening while clients unload their troubles. It is customer service taken to the extreme, and sex is strictly not part of it.

The formula seems to work until Michelle begins falling for one of the clients and Katrina ends up at the center of a very public scandal. The question is whether they can really earn money for the work so many women do for nothing, or whether they are throwing their lives away. This fast-paced, comic novel aims to make readers laugh, shout and cry, and to take their minds off their own to-do lists for a while.